


All Realms

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Afterlife, Experimental, M/M, Modern AU, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26203387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: for the terror_exe prompt “Has anyone ever invited you to all realms, dr goodsir?”
Relationships: Henry Collins/Harry D. S. Goodsir
Kudos: 18
Collections: @terror_exe Flash Fest





	All Realms

Dying has all the terror of falling, all the blood’s scrambling impulse against gravity, except one sinks and spreads like a solute dye in a solution. There is pain, of course, but he is not a part of that, for he is no longer a part of anything. Rather, he is becoming a part of all things. Shearing into particulate, then the incorporeal: thin and coiling he rises above the body that had been his and takes stock. He’d grown thinner, wild-haired. He’d never been vain, exactly, but liked for things to be just so. His curls just such a length, his waistcoat cut just such a way to conceal a softness to his gut that embarrassed him deeply, as diminutive as he was. He should have been hard. He should have been built like Hickey. But then he would have _been_ Hickey, carved as he was of deprivation and grunt labor. Erosion’s work. No, Goodsir was Goodsir and his body was his, and he should miss it. The finicky gut, the surfeit of hair, the recalcitrant curls at his ears. 

What he does not think of—Henry, for one. That’s easier than expected. Nearly forty years of habitual self-abnegation makes it nearly instinctive. He does not think of the man’s wide grin, spied just once like a rare bird; he does not think of the heat in the hollow of his neck and how he longed to fold himself small and naked as a hatchling and nest there. A fanciful image, of course. Absurd, these thoughts of nesting and birds. Hollow bone and the lift of wind. He’d smelled like sweat and soap, Henry had, and a little like woodsmoke; and there’d been a moment when they broke their embrace that it had seemed very possible, very simple, to kiss him. Moment, moments. Always there was a sort of hum in the space between them, a wavelength of color no eye could perceive. But there was no realm in which Goodsir would have risked so much. _Nor a realm,_ he reflects bitterly, _in which I was worth the same risk._

He hears something: twinned scuffling steps on the shale outside. Out of instinct, he hides, though what _he_ is now he couldn’t say. He drifts through the coarse, wind-rimed canvas of the tent—can smell during the split-second it takes to snake between the threads the mildew and the smoke and the grease of the years. He feels a few atoms hook like burrs on the fabric as he rises into the white sky, the thin undulation of cloud. 

He raises his face to the muffled sun, feels as though he is swimming. The light pierces eyes he can’t remember closing and when he opens them he makes out the alice-blue billowing of a curtain blowing inward.

“You were talking in your sleep again,” Henry says. He’s slouched in a chair next to the bed, book open on his knee. Though portly now, he still emanates an oxen strength, his shoulders not yet stooped in that way of most septuagenarians. His spectacles are pushed up on his brow.

“It always feels so real,” Harry says, sitting up and looking at the muted television flickering away at the foot of the bed, its picture dim in the bright room. At first he’d hated how Henry always needed the television on, how when they’d first gotten together he’d fall asleep on the couch half the time because he couldn’t bear the dark silence of the bedroom. The quiet made him nervous, he’d said. Afraid. Like a trap door might open up in the black. Harry had been keen to know if it was because of Vietnam; Henry had been keen to discuss it no further. And so Harry had accustomed himself to the constant glib patter of late night hosts and the polished agonies of soap operas and every scrap of pedestrian vacuity in between.

But it was muted now, thank God, for through the sun’s glare on the curved, smooth screen he can finally make out what’s on. Behind a mahogany podium, pacing tight circuits back and forth and gesturing dramatically, is the hulking paunchy figure of one of those televangelists—the one-legged one. Was he also the one who claimed Christ had sent him visions of a hell of ice, a white demon bear with the face of a man? 

“What did I say?” He asks. “In my sleep, I mean.”

Henry looks at him, attempts a smile—but those are rare these days. “Oh, what was it... ah! ‘God lies in all realms’. Funny words for an avowed atheist like yourself. Well. What would you like for breakfast, my dear?”

Harry licks his lips and lays his head back on the pillow. He’s so tired. It’s getting easier and easier to just lie in bed until afternoon, until Henry helps bundle him up and gives him his arm out to the Oldsmobile, drives him to the sprawling medical block in the shade of the freeway for his radiation treatment. All the buildings arrayed in the thickening dusk like so many ships in ice.


End file.
